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Zelenskyy Bans Opposition Parties; Nationalizes Media
Is there a chance… a slight chance, but still a chance … that Volodymyr Zelenskyy isn’t quite the great savior of democracy we are being told he is?
In an address to the nation delivered Sunday, he announced a temporary ban on “any activity” by 11 political parties. The ban includes the Opposition Platform – For Life party, which holds 43 seats in Ukraine’s national parliament and is the largest opposition party. Opposition Platform – For Life is a pro-Russia party, but on March 8, party leader Yuriy Boyko demanded that Russia “stop the aggression against Ukraine,” according to Ukrainian outlet LB.
Also.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has signed a decree that combines all national TV channels into one platform, citing the importance of a “unified information policy” under martial law, his office said in a statement on Sunday.
His defenders will say that his country is under martial law in response to a foreign invasion and such times have justified extreme measures; like unto FDR ordering Japanese-Americans rounded up and put into camps in World War II, Woodrow Wilson jailing and prosecuting anti-war protesters during World War I, or Abraham Lincoln suspending Habeas Corpus during the Civil War.
This would be an awesome time to have reliable news media that had not been co-opted by the ruling party into propagandists for the Official Narrative. Is Zelenskyy a Saint of Democracy? Is Putin really the embodiment of evil? Is it treason, as Mitt “Pierre Delecto” Romney suggests, to be skeptical of the Official Version of Events? I really cannot say.
What I suspect but cannot prove is that Zelenskyy is probably a patriot trying to preserve his country, but also a politician who is not letting a crisis go to waste and a man who evidently knows how to work the media. And while Putin was wrong to invade Ukraine, he is probably not the arch-villain caricature the administration and their media make him out to be. I can’t know about any of that sure, but what I do know is this:
- All of our information about Zelenskyy, Putin, Ukraine, and Russia gets to us via the Administration and National Media.
- Both of those have lied to us repeatedly and shamelessly in order to advance Democrat-friendly narratives.
Biden desperately needs a foreign policy win after his absolutely disastrous showing in Afghanistan. That’s certainly plenty of motivation to shape the Russia-Ukraine narrative as a battle of Pure Democratic Good against Pure Russian Evil.
Published in General
I agree with this.
I think the whole “Good Guy/Bad Guy” model is not the way to look at it.
One can both want Russia to fail and to not think Ukraine or its leaders are Mr. Clean.
Yes, and question whether the media and administration that have been lying to us about literally-not-figuratively everything else are lying about this as well.
Is every media report about Ukraine literally the opposite of true? Every element of every report?
Bush was wrong. I thought so at the time.
Zelensky would be crazy to allow a “pro Russian” Party to exist when his country is at war with Russia. There should only be pro Ukrainian parties in Ukraine.
They are not lying about the fact that Russia invaded Ukraine.
War and disaster reporting is always more truthful than political reporting, even with the worst left-wing outlets.
But, that story about the heroic thirteen Ukrainian soldiers telling the Russian ship to GFY and then dying heroic deaths?
That was a lie.
And the ‘Ghost of Keeve’ MiG pilot who shot down six Russian aircraft?
That was propaganda.
And there have been others.
Propaganda is a part of war, but it should not form the basis of policy.
That’s the entire point. Russian invaded Ukraine. Russia was wrong to do so. No reasonable person disputes that. But that’s quite different than saying Zelenskyy is a champion of democracy. Given our recent experience, we should be exceptionally skeptical when American media proclaims anyone to be a hero.
Criminy. Those are details. You know what else? They’re also suppressing pictures of damage done to Ukrainian assets, and not reporting on things that might reflect poorly on Ukrainian forces, leadership, or people. A lot of people have already priced that in. I said so some time ago, and I assume that numerous others have.
It is not the case that everybody who thinks Russia is bad and Ukraine should not have been invaded, and should be supported, is smoking crack. As I said to Drew on another thread, it starts to sound like a “sheeple” rant real quick.
If no military action is taken by NATO against the Russian attempt at territorial conquest now, will the same people here making their cases against military intervention be saying, perhaps in June or as early as May, “Poland was never a real democracy”, or “Poland was corrupt, so any moral superiority you ascribe to their cause is unmerited”, and so forth? Place your bets.
Thank you for being more specific. That gives us something that is possible to talk about. I hadn’t heard those linked comments before, but that’s probably because I pay very little attention to our news media. In fact, I actively avoid listening to or reading them.
Personally, I don’t very much value Trudeau’s recommendations on what is democratic and what is not. Trudeau has recently shown that he is a sort of a Junior Putin. He now seems to be trying to wrap himself in the aura of a true freedom fighter, Zelensky. The political charlatans among us will do that sort of thing.
But yes, there is a lot we don’t know about what kind of freedom Zelensky would lead Ukraine to. As a human being, he is corruptible in the same way all freedom fighters have been, including our own George Washington. That’s one reason why the United States and other NATO countries shouldn’t do Ukraine’s fighting for it. We can supply it with more weapons that it can use to fight for its own freedom, though. If Zelensky was already as corrupted as all the oligarchs that have gone before him, he would have sold out the country to Putin by now. The fact that he has put his own life on the line is a very good sign that he is different than the usual and worthy of our help, at least for now. (Unless those people who said it was just a matter of time before the Russian military machine would crush Kyiv were 100 percent faking it, in which case maybe he was always as safe in Kyiv as he would be in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.)
That has been and continues to be my recommendation.
China and Russia are two heads of the same problem. Letting Russia arrive at some settlement with NATO, unless that settlement is a more or less complete surrender of Russia’s demands on Ukraine, will just give China the green light to go ahead and take Taiwan (another country that hasn’t exactly been an exemplar of democracy over the years).
As I pointed out elsewhere, anyone who says “they have been lying to us about everything” is lying to us.
No. What they are lying about or obfuscating:
Russia was promised “no NATO expansion to the east.”
The USA interfered in Russian elections (at Yeltsin’s behest.) Under Clinton, at that. Hillary later made up her claims about Trump and the Russians.
Despite that, Putin later made overtures about Russia joining NATO (I think this may have been related to his (real? pretextual?) turning to the West as allies against radical Islam; he was turned down.
NATO’s eastward expansion rolled on, including joint military exercises on Russia’s borders.
Putin then made it clear that Ukrainian membership in Ukraine was a hard red line.
In recent years, NATO’s exercises have included putting artillery pieces within range of St Petersburg.
NATO has been discussing admitting Ukraine.
It may be relevant that while discussion of the Ukraine situation has included talk about the Cuban Missile Crisis, what is not so much talked about is that US missiles in Turkey contributed to the USSR’s decision to emplace ICBMs in Cuba, and that while the USSR’s removing its missiles features prominently in American stories about the period, the US’s quiet removal of its missiles from Turkey as part of the agreement that ended the crisis is generally not mentioned.
Does this make Putin a good guy? No. And not only are the Ukrainians not Mr. Clean, neither are many American pols now pushing war with Russia. Families like the Bidens, the Pelosis, the Kerrys, the Romneys, and more (dare I say “oligarchs”?) whose graft and grift involving Ukraine has made them wealthy, and whose fortunes will suffer if Putin succeeds.
“If you question the propaganda, you want Putin to win.”
If we’re going to risk World War III on this guy and his country, maybe we should consider facts and not propaganda.
Were it up to me, and it’s not, I’d just create a Neutral Zone stretching from Finland, through the Baltics, Belarus, and Ukraine. I would give the Neutral Bloc a seat on the Security Council, and arrange for them to have adequate defenses to repel an invasion. That would mollify Russia’s territorial security concerns, secure the independence of those countries, and provide for an adequate defense. Then, Western Europe could go back to buying Russian gas and spending 1.5% of GDP on national defense.
Kinda like Trump said — why can’t we investigate the Biden/Ukraine shenanigans? LtCpl Vindemann O HO SAY CAN YOU SEE can burn in hell along with Schiff.
I like this a lot, and I support an old Lithuania/Poland (some play in the joints) proposal or idea about the “intermarium”. Similar idea; deeper strategic depth. Would put Poland as well in the “land between the seas” bloc, and while they wouldn’t have to be neutral (the whole thing), it would be a buffer zone.
Problems internal to it were just who would be the Germany and who would be the France in the arrangement (EU), while everybody knows who would be the Italys and Spains. Lithuani used to be much bigger, and so did Poland, each often at the other’s expense, and IIRC sometimes at the expense of Belarus. The other problem is the same problem we see now — Russia will not allow a buffer that is not Russia-dominated. They want their sphere of influence; they want every bordering country to be a vassal or an ally.
Separate (ish) idea; I tend to think that NATO expansion or not, Russia was going to invade Ukraine as soon as Russia had the might and the US had the fecklessness. I think it’s right on schedule even if NATO were all the way back at the Rhine.
EDIT: I would support this much more if Poland were not already in NATO — Poland earned their way in, playing a pivotal role in the destruction of the Soviet death-grip on Europe. So with the north-south Catholic/Orthodox split, and the east-west Rooskie/NATO split, this dog won’t hunt. I just *like* it.
To be fair, none of those organizations or people (with the possible exception of Adam Kinzinger) shape the greater public narrative in America, and none of them have legislative nor executive powers over any place in America. They are just squawking pundits with extremely small audiences.
You are saying that all these things are lies or obfuscations? I think they are all real events, with the exception of Ukrainian membership in Ukraine being a hard red line. That one is just absurd.
I don’t think really anything mollifies Russia’s territorial security concerns. They have had paranoid leadership for at least 100 years. They always complain that foreign adversaries are out to do them harm. It’s a tradition. Vlad recently worried that Sweden and Finland of all places are out to get them.
They are all historical events that are ignored or suppressed to help create the good guy/bad guy narrative. Thanks for catching my typo.
Well, I guess they weren’t suppressed from me!
So?
Right. Like pro-Putin propaganda which should be countered. If you thought Czar Vlad the Magnificent was justified in going to war based on the fear of having a NATO-friendly country on his border, why think he would not be justified in going to war when he has a real NATO member on his new border?
For further reading: Putin and Ur-Fascism – The Cosmopolitan Globalist (substack.com)
I agree with this while still supporting Ukraine and opposing Putin’s invasion.
Which proposal would be forced on Russia, how? Given the current geopolitical reality. And If Belarus joins in the war against Ukraine this week?
Nonsense. Russia is the aggressor. There is no moral equivalence. NATO is a defensive institution. Russia has no right to attack its neighbors.